FilmStruck

Although FilmStruck has existed since 2006, I only discovered it last fall when I happened upon an online mention and decided to explore the website. A streaming service like Netflix, FilmStruck is owned by Turner Classic Movies and features classic and more obscure art house and independent films from Hollywood and across the globe. A significant portion of its movies are part of the acclaimed Criterion Collection, which struck an exclusive deal with TCM and FilmStruck this past year to take over Criterion's US streaming from Hulu. As a result, FilmStruck's cinematic cornucopia now includes feature, short and documentary films by major 20th century international filmmakers ranging from Michelangelo Antonioni, Catherine Breillat, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Costa-Gavras to Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, Peter Weir and Wim Wenders. Unlike Netflix, though, there is no DVD option, nor any original series, as far as I can tell. (MUBI is another cinephile service, like FilmStruck, that I've downloaded the Apple TV app for, but haven't experimented with it yet. Green Cine, which I belonged to years ago, was a DVD subscription service, and did not have a streaming component.)

One of the curated mini-festivals,
films based in the City of Love, Paris

I've only been using the service for a few weeks, but I've been impressed by the movie selection and additional features available so far. The site organizes the films by general FilmStruck and Criterion Collection offerings, and by genre (with the total tally of films in each), newest arrivals, and most popular viewer choices, while also offering curated micro-festivals organized by theme, concept, filmmaker or cinematographer, aesthetic style, and more. If you didn't know anything about Dusan Makavejev's oeuvre, or perhaps have only seen a few Alain Resnais or Chantal Akerman films, FilmStruck provides a quick tutorial. As with Criterion DVDs, additional features, such as trailers, interviews with filmmakers, clips on film production, and so on, also are sometimes available. 

I do wish, however, that more sub-Saharan African, Asian and Latin American films, more films by women and more LGBTQ-themed films were available on the site. The search tool, though it works fine, doesn't allow searching by country or region, so it has often been through the "related titles" list of suggested films that I've been able to find and bookmark films I want to see. (I realized that another option for Criterion Collection films was to go directly to Criterion's site, identify as many of the films I wanted to see there, and then add them to my watchlist if they were on FilmStruck.)

Now playing

What's also not clear is whether and when most of the films's runs online (based on the site's licenses for them) expire. The curated mini-festivals do vanish, but do all the films in them remain online in perpetuity or for some fixed period (one month? three? six?) that only the site knows about? Clearly not all the Criterion Collection films are on the site, which I attribute to licensing and copyright issues, but is there a key or guide somewhere to let a viewer know which ones are on the site and how long they'll stay up. (This would be very helpful for planning the order in which to watch them.) I do know that a number of sites list which Netflix films are arriving or disappearing--didn't Netflix used to post this info on their site?--but I haven't found a similar calendar for FilmStruck. I also like the simple, easy-to-navigate interface. The site is more streamlined than Netflix, especially after the latter's "upgrade." Please keep the design intuitive and user-friendly, FilmStruck! Also, based on my recent experience, customer service has been sterling. When I was having trouble with my registration, I used the contact form, and promptly and repeatedly heard from FilmStruck to ensure that everything was operating smoothly.

Genres (and available films
in each category)

In terms of the films I've watched so far, they have been a mix of films I've always wanted to see, some I've seen before, and some I've just stumbled upon. In the first category, Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1973 masterpiece Touki Bouki has been a revelation. A vibrant narrative about a young straight couple's desire to emigrate to France for better opportunities, Touki Bouki succeeds in fusing some of the formal experimentation of the French New Wave with the poetic realism and social commentary of 1970s sub-Saharan African cinema. In its imaginative play with editing, and its frank and comical depiction of queer hustling, alone, it it feels more daring than the vast majority of what is being produced in either Hollywood or Nollywood these days. I would say the same about the aesthetic daring and the political component, though with a rather different content and focus, about Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), which I also had never seen until a week ago.

A few films on my watchlist queue

In the second category, I watched David Cronenberg's still disturbing Scanners (1981), which holds up in terms of its visionary and horror qualities decades later. I know Cronenberg has shifted away from horror and science fiction, which in his body of work usually had a conspiratorial component, but I hope that he returns, even if just for one more time, to the genre in which he made his name. In terms of sheer awfulness, though, his 1979 film The Brood, which I hadn't seen before, wins the award. There is a scene that truly embodies the term "horrifying," and it was so disturbing that when the film first appeared that the worst of the horror was edited out in the US. Thankfully FilmStruck is screening the complete version, but again, as graphic as many Hollywood films now are, nothing comes close to Cronenberg's presentation of motherly love as literal monstrousness at the moment of trans-human post-parturition.

One of the films I'd never heard of but decided to watch that also fits the "horror" category, with a twist, is Czech director Jaromil Jires's 1970 film Valerie's Week of Wonders. Hybrid in genre, surreal in form and style, the movie explores a teenage girl's sexual awakening, if lived in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Let's just say that films of this sort, whether under the horror or fantasy genres, or some other, simply don't get made any more. Another was Nils Gaup's Pathfinder (1987), a historical thriller and Academy Award nominee about a peaceful group of indigenous Samí residents of what is now Finnland, circa 1000 AD, whose tranquil existence undergoes a shock when an all-male troop of Chudes, ancestors to Russians, arrives, with brutal consequences. A teenage hero steps in, and its his canniness, rather than physical prowess, that proves decisive. A third was Avie Luthra's 2012 film Lucky, about a young rural Black South African boy who loses his mother to AIDS, then moves to the city to live with an uncle who despises him and blows through his school money. Lucky craves and will do anything for an education, and bonds with an older, racist South Asian woman. This film was painful to sit through at times, but in the end moved me to tears.

Other discoveries: films I'd never heard of or had been intending to watch by Youssef Chahine, Victor Erice, John Frankenheimer, Aki Kaurismäki, Martin Ritt, Ken Russell, Carlos Saura, Jacques Tati; and by directors I'd never heard of, including Luis García Berlanga, Juan Carlos Cremata, Ahmed El Maanouni, Metin Erksan, Pierre Etaix, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Mikio Naruse, Edgar Morin, Kundan Shah,, and many others. Next up, I think, Pedro Costa's widely acclaimed docu-fictional trilogy about Fontainhas, in Lisbon, Portugal: Ossos (1987), In Vanda's Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), and as many of the Chantal Akerman movies as I can get through before classes start next week.

Black Diaspora in Hollywood 2.0

Watching Sunday night's Homeland finale, which brutally and ironically dispatched one of my favorite characters from the show, CIA Counterintelligence Chief David Estes, superbly embodied by British actor David Harewood (see below), I recalled that during Black History Month in 2006 I wrote a blog post pointing out the sizable number of black actors from across the African Diaspora now in Hollywood, and featured stars including Idris Elba, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Adewale Akinnoye-Agbaje, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Edjiofor, Garcelle Beauvais, and Boris Kodjoe. I noted then that I hadn't seen any discussion at all of this reality in the mainstream media, though the black film and TV communities in the US appeared to be acknowledging the diversity of their talent pool, and, like the larger black communities across the country, reflected the truth that the US black population has always comprised people from all over the world. As far as cinema and TV go, you need only cite iconic non-US-born black actors from the past such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Juano Hernández, Frank Silvera, Austin Stoker, Percy Rodriguez, and Zakes Mokae to bear this out.

As of 2012, the trend continues; just as with white actors in Hollywood, a number of high-profile black stars of film and TV shows are originally from overseas, but have found roles and homes (even if temporarily) here. The list below suggests that black actors from several different parts of the globe are making their names and careers in the US. Some, like Mel B, play themselves; some, like Dania Ramirez, are able to get roles crossing ethnicities; others like, Harewood and Oyelowo, quite effortlessly slip into African American/unspecified black roles without much problem. The British actors have gained considerable attention, and it remains the case that in the UK, roles for talented black actors are scarce.  In Hollywood, there are many more roles, but few leading ones, outside biopics, for actors of the caliber of many of these folks or their African American colleagues. As the country darkens, though, one can hope.... Here are a few of the most notable contemporary black diaspora actors gracing US TV screens:

David Harewood (UK)
Homeland, Blood Diamond

Ashley Madekwe (UK)
Revenge, Drop Dead Gorgeous

David Oyelowo (UK)
Red Tails, Last King of Scotland, Lincoln, The Help

Naomie Harris (UK)
Skyfall, Miami Vice, 28 Days Later

Benjamin Charles Watson (Jamaica/Canada)
L. A. Complex

Gloria Reuben (Canada)
ER, Feast of All Saints, Lincoln 

Dayo Ade (Nigeria/Canada)
L. A. Complex, Lost, Let Go, Degrassi High

Dania Ramírez (Dominican Republic)

Entourage, Heroes, Fat Albert, She Hate Me

Dayo Akeniyi (Nigeria)
The Hunger Games

Mel B (Melanie Brown/Scary Spice) (UK)

X Factor, Mel B: It's a Scary World

Dwain Murphy (Canada)
Saving Hope, The Mentalist, How She Move 

Enuka Okuma (Canada)
Rookie Blue, 24, Andromeda 

Lyriq Bent (Canada)
Rookie Blue, Saw III, Saw IV, Four Brothers

Marsha Thomason (UK) 

2 Broke Girls, General Hospital, Lost

Peter Mensah (Ghana/Canada)
Avatar, True Blood, Spartacus

Lorraine Toussaint (Trinidad & Tobago)
Scandal, Friday Night Lights, Saving Grace, Ugly Betty

Rocsi (Díaz) (Honduras)

106 & Park, Brothers, Soul Ties

Aml Ameen (UK)
Harry's Law, Red Tails, CSI Miami

Harriet Lenabe (South Africa) [shown with Don Cheadle)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Hotel Rwanda

Nonso Anozie (UK)
Game of Thrones, The Grey

Kandyse McClure (South Africa)
Battlestar Galactica, Persons Unknown

Movies/Latinos/Race

I am going to post a review of the new movie Red Tails (and one of the still relatively new Shame) soon, but watching the film it dawned on my yet again that Hollywood, by which I mean the entire constellation of people, institutions, structures, and the system of and for mainstream filmmaking in the United States, still has no sense, even after being a century into its development, and over 400 years since black people first arrived on the shores of what is now this country (or 500+ in this hemisphere), of how to portray us on film. But it's not only us, and it's not only Hollywood. So often when I read about black people, or other people of color, people who're not male, not wealthy, not Christian, not straight, not documented immigrants or holding citizenship-level papers, whose lives emerge from anything other than the most normative scenarios, I note how stunted the discussions of these folks tend to be, which I attribute in part to the absence of having someone--journalists, scholars, etc.--writing who have any real familiarity or depth in relation to such folks or topics.

I'll hold up on discussing black folks and Hollywood for now, but I came across an article in the Times that provoked these thoughts anew. By Mireya Navarro, who has written extensively it's titled "For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color," and she traces how the US color=race binary (down to terms like "biracial," so beloved of so many nowadays), bureacratic pigeonholes, and related conceptualizations of identity lead many latinos to choose differing ways of thinking about themselves. One point that Navarro notes is one I rarely hear noted anywhere: on the US Census, for some time now, a majority of latinos have self-identified as "white."  In fact, in most discussions of latinos and certainly in many depictions in the mainstream of latinos, there is no nuance when it comes to race; instead, latino registers as a racial category, and the history and complexity of being a latino in the US gets reduced to and reinscribe racist stereotypes of and commonplaces about who latinos are in the US. With regard to Hollywood and TV as well, I still see not just white-outs in terms of casting and storylines, but when latinos do appear, as in HBO's recent series How To Make It In America, they're cast in the same sorts of stereotypical roles (in the case of this show, all of the latinos, including one of the show's protagonists, played Dominican-American actor Victor Rasuk, were linked to drugs, selling and using) that are for me just maddening.

Fortuitously I came across a January 2012 article, in the Huffington Post, about this very topic concerning latina actresses; titled "Hollywood Typecasting: Some Latina Actresses Are Forever  Relegated to Roles as Maids and Abuelas," it notes the extremely narrow casting range available for most latinas in Hollywood; they are either domestics, sexual spitfires, or grandmothers. One incredibly talented actress, Lupe Ontiveros, has been cast as a maid more than 150 times! She doesn't turn down the roles because she wants to act and has bills to pay, but it's so telling that these tend to be the only roles she can get. As I read this article I though of the irony too the two black actresses nominated for the 2012 Academy Awards, Viola Davis for Best Actress and Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress, were cited for playing domestics. No other black actresses, or other actresses of color, including no latinas, white, black, other, or otherwise, for that matter, playing any other roles over the last year, were nominated for Oscars, and many an actress of color waits for a role other than the stereotypical ones.

Navarro's article also brought to mind the clip below, which I first saw on the Monaga site (h/t Anthony!), of latinos in Hollywood talking about having to choose between being black and being latino; most of them do not and won't, meaning that while they do get parts playing African Americans (or, in some cases, black people of indistinct ethnicity), they often do not get cast as latinos, since the idea of black latinos is too complex for many in Hollywood to grasp. (I have said it before but I'll say it again: there are more black latinos outside the US than there are African Americans within our borders. All African Americans are black, but not all black people are African American.)  In Red Tails, two of the actors, Andre Royo (best known as "Bubbles" in the exceptional HBO series The Wire) and Tristan Wilds (who also starred as a child actor on The Wire and has since gained fame on the new version [why?] of Beverly Hills, 90210) have Latin American roots but are--consider themselves--black Americans. They are black and latino.



Discussions around race and latinos led two younger latinos, Alicia Anabel Santos and Renzo Devia, to film a documentary, "Afrolatinos: The Untold Story," a clip of which is below, to address this issue. The clip also notes that Bianca I. Laureano and others specifically created a blog, The Latinegr@s Project, to take up this topic.



This is an issue not just in the US, though. Last November on Fly Brotha's site, he peeped a documentary by Panamanian-American filmmaker Dash Harris entitled Negro on identity, race and racism among latinos in the US and Latin America. Here's a little taste:



None of this is new or news, of course--at least to most readers of this blog, I'm sure. What I do wish, though, is that more journalists would take up some of the realities Navarro, for her part, particularly concerning the 60% of latinos in the US who are of Mexican ancestry, and the actors and actresses in the black and latino in Hollywood clip for theirs portray, and that there were more folks making films and TV shows who had a grasp of the world that didn't consist in the same tired stereotypes I have been seeing my entire life. (Or that my colleague Ramon Rivera-Servera explores in his work on latinos, race, class, and performance, just to give one example of a brilliant scholarly exploration of these ideas.) Don't films like Quinceañera or Real Women Have Curves have any effect? Don't they suggest that maybe there are more stories out there than the ones we see over and over?  Or, to take two TV examples, if the Steve Harvey Show and New York Undercover, both shows from the 1990s, could cast latinos--and in this case, Afrolatinos--in roles (Merlin Santana in the former, Lauren Vélez in the latter) that depicted them as latinos and went beyond stereotypes, why are we going backwards now?

African Diaspora in Hollywood + New Orleans Libraries Need Books

Perhaps another blogger has already covered this topic, but since it's Black History Month and when I was watching the Lars von Trier film Manderlay, it struck me that recent studies on the shifting ethnic and national origin cast of Black America (as Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's Black Migrations site and similar studies on this topic have made clear) are being reflected in some of the brown faces on screen in Hollywood these days. Each of the following actors was born in another country, or grew up there, and several have at some point played not only played foreign roles (as Africans, as Black characters of indeterminate national origin, etc.), but African-American ones. In fact, I remember that some fans of the excellent HBO series "The Wire" were very surprised to learn that the gorgeous Idris Elba was British and had a pronounced accent (when not in his role as "Stringer Bell"). Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who first came to wider US notice through her superb performance in the British film Secrets and Lies, now plays Vivian Johnson on the US TV show Without a Trace (which I believe also stars Australian Anthony LaPaglia as an American).

Idris Elba	Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje	Maurice Dean Wint

Clockwise, from left: Idris Elba [UK], Marianne Jean-Baptiste [UK], Maurice Dean Wint [UK/Canada], Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje [UK]

Thandie Newton	Djimon Hounsou
Richard Chevolleau	Sophie Okonedo

Clockwise, from left: Thandie Newton [Zambia], Djimon Hounsou [Benin], Sophie Okonedo [UK], Richard Chevolleau [Jamaica/Canada]

Boris Kodjoe	Zoe Saldaña
Razzaq Adoti	Adrian Lester

Clockwise, from left: Boris Kodjoe [Austria], Zoe Saldaña [US/PR/Dominican Republic], Adrian Lester [UK], Razaaq Adoti [UK]

Isaach de Bankolé	Garcelle Beauvais
Rae-Dawn Chong	Chiwetel Ejiofor

Isaach de Bankolé [Côte d'Ivoire], Garcelle Beauvais [Haiti], Chiwetel Ejiofor [Nigeria/UK], Rae-Dawn Chong [Canada]

I was trying to think of others who might fit this category; any suggestions?

Roles for Black actors from any background in Hollywood still far too often fall into stereotypes and are nowhere near as numerous as for White actors, but over the last 30 years, things have improved, in terms of there being more films directed (and produced) by Black people, more TV roles, especially on cable, and more race-blind casting opportunities, which benefits not only African Americans and other Blacks living in the US, but other non-American Black actors, especially from Britain and Canada (Rae-Dawn Chong's father Tommy Chong is Canadian, but several of her siblings, like hottie brother Marcus Chong, were born in the US.)

I wonder if there have been any discussions among American-born Black actors about the presence of foreign-born Black actors in Hollywood, and what sorts of conversations have occurred between and among the two groups. Is their presence even on the radar screen? (I know some Black writers and directors have written non-US roles into their work, and for many years African-American actors have played non-US Black characters.) I also wonder if the majority of African-Americans, especially outside the Eastern seaboard and larger cities, realize how great the immigration of Blacks from Africa, Latin America and Europe has been over the last 10-15, and if folks are even aware that these actors are not US-born, though I'd argue that at some level, people may be aware, since there are foreign-born Blacks (and not only just people from the Anglophone Caribbean) living in predominantly Black and non-Black communities across the US. Whether the presence and representation in film and televisual media of non-US born Black actors may be reshaping perceptions is another question, though it's one I think that could and should be posed.

±±±

From an email I received from the wonderful Carolyn Micklem of Cave Canem:

Seeking Book Donations
The New Orleans Public Library
(New Orleans LA)

The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after Katrina. The staff will assess which titles will be designated for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. Please send your books to:

Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112

If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate.